Saturday, October 27, 2018

The "Gift" of GAB

"HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) likes to bring invaders in that they kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in." - Robert Bowers, alleged Tree of Life synagogue shooter and prominent GAB member

"Eat shit, Ed." Microsoft to Jewish reporter Ed Krassenstein from The Hill when asked last August for comment about Microsoft-owned GAB

Microsoft is anti Semitic and quite possibly racist. That is an ineluctable fact. At the very least, Microsoft is soft on fascism and racism.

GAB, the anti-social media sited owned by Microsoft Azure, is the place where Aryan and angry masculinity goes for its last gasp after getting kicked off legitimate social media. Azure is a cloud site whereby people can set up entire social media domains and, since fascists can't seem to shut the fuck up about their hateful views that are shared and sheltered by one Donald J. Trump, aka Orange Julius Caesar, they'd taken refuge at Gab after getting kicked off Twitter, Facebook and after sites such as Stormfront, at least temporarily, were shut down.

To be fair for a minute, Microsoft had warned GAB to remove its hateful content and gave them 48 hours to comply... early last August. And then Robert Bowers, a visible and major member of GAB, decided to take matters into his own hands. This morning, Bowers walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh and shot 11 parishioners to death during a typically peaceful shabbat service.

The comments used as an epigraph above were made minutes before he left for Tree of Life. During the mass murder, he screamed anti Semitic comments such as, "All you Jews must die!" or words to that effect. This was less than a month after Trump publicly rejected globalism (some would interpret that as "Jews") at the UN.

And, to get back to Krassenstein for a moment, when The Hill reporter had asked for a comment from Microsoft regarding their timid and toothless warning to Gab to tone down the fascist and racist rhetoric, whoever is in charge of Microsoft's Twitter account told him, "Dear Ed, Eat shit" before it was hastily taken down.

To summarize: Massive corporations treat fascist web sites, that they own, with kid gloves but when a Jewish reporter asks that same corporation for some clarification, they tell him to "eat shit." Hence the opening line, "Microsoft is anti Semitic and quite possibly racist." With such priorities and targeted animus on full display, there is no other conclusion to infer.

The Caravan's Already Here

Then there was yesterday's arrest of the alleged MAGA bomber, Cesar Sayoc, a 56 year-old pizza delivery driver. Sayoc who, like the Chris Farley character Matt Foley, "lived in a van" and, while he didn't live down by a river, nonetheless worked for New River Pizza and Fresh Kitchen, was also quite active on right wing media. He gleefully shared the more hateful stories and videos from Fox "News" as well as Steve Bannon's Breitbart. He's also a registered Republican and had been photographed several times at Trump rallies wearing a MAGA hat and holding up pro-Trump signs.

Naturally, the spin cycle has long since begun in the right wing whitewash brigade. Jeff Sessions would only say, "it appears as if he's a partisan" before adding we'd have to wait until the evidence comes out. No we don't. Sayoc's van is a rolling Trump Twitter feed, with cross hairs over the faces of the so-called president's most bitter enemies and opponents, those who were the most frequent targets of that same Twitter account. And the 13 pipe bombs that we know of that were sent out were to those same people, Trump's favorite targets, including former presidents Obama and Clinton, Maxine Waters (off of whose pipe bomb the FBI had lifted one of Sayoc's fingerprints), Joe Biden, CNN's New York offices, etc.

So, no, you malignant racist leprechaun, there's nothing to wait for.

At the same time Sayoc was being arrested at an Auto Zone in Plantation, FL, this was what Trunp was most concerned with:

As you can probably expect, when asked about the MAGA Bomber's capture, all Trump could come up with was that the bomber "was a person who preferred me over others", as if he was tacitly accepting this mentally ill man's endorsement. Then true to form, he denied any responsibility for his rhetoric inflaming this idiot's hatred despite going to his hate rallies and having his fat, orange jiggling puss plastered all over the windows of his van, thereby in the process making it some polluting shrine to the Cult of Trump.

Sayoc, I'd like to repeat, is, as it was immediately discovered, also a registered Republican. He's not a "Bernie bro", a liberal, a liberal plant or a patsy. His Republican roots go back deeply.

And not only is the government and Fox "News" in on the fix, so are those selfsame corporate media entities such as Twitter. Just 16 days ago, when he'd begun sending out his idiotic pipe bombs that, thankfully, had harmed no one, Sayoc had threatened Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie. Ritchie, seeing the threat, reported it to Twitter. This was Twitter's response:

Then, when they finally got around to suspending Sayoc's Twitter account after his highly-publicized arrest yesterday, they sent Ritchie this:

"In error", my ass. This is another of countless examples of Twitter alone tolerating fascist hate speech and eliminationist rhetoric, with the supreme example of this Trump's own Twitter account that had threatened nuclear war on several occasions. For the record, this reporter's various accounts have been suspended and shadowbanned, even though he had never, ever threatened anyone.

But the fact remains that Trump had been bad-mouthing Rep. Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, CNN, Joe Biden, George Soros, Barack Obama and many others and those are precisely the people to whom Sayoc had attempted to send his barely functional bombs. He'd been to Trump's hate rallies. He'd covered virtually all the windows of his van with images of Trump and Pence. There is not one degree of separation. Trump might as well had adopted the crazy bastard into his own family or appointed him to his Cabinet.

Unless you're a fascist who happens to be well-funded and well-connected.

A career Veteran's Affair's bureaucrat, David Thomas, is so fond of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, that he hung his portrait on a wall in his office until his staff pressured him to remove it through a petition. Donald Trump has or has had people working in his administration with provable ties to white nationalist movements such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who before Miller's promotion as senior policy adviser to Il Douche, was very chummy with Alt-Right founder, Richard Spencer.

Trump himself gave just August last year some infamous cover by referring to the white nationalists, neo Nazis and KKK members at Charlottesbille as "very fine people." Yes, 62,000,000 idiots put in the White House a Supreme Idiot who treats motorcycle gangs, racists and Nazis with kid gloves while savagely calling the media "the enemy of the people" and vilifying African American congresswomen such as Maxine Waters and Frederica S. Wilson.

Microsoft hosts a racist and antisemitic website and reacts in an unmistakably hostile manner when asked for comments by Jewish reporters. Twitter had to be shamed into shutting down accounts like Cesar Sayoc's even when presented with palpable evidence of threats he's made to a woman. Facebook happily took rubles from Russian spies that greatly helped get white nationalist and racist Donald Trump elected yet terminate the accounts of people critical of Israel and even admitted last year it did so at the direction of the US and Israeli governments.

We're living in very chilling times and the people who seem to be the most victimized by right wing extremism through either corporate action or, in Rochelle Ritchie's case, inaction are those calling for justice. The people who expect more than that, that selfsame radical right wing, are the ones most protected by our government and technology corporations.

The latter-day United States is a nation with such skewed priorities that just looking at the headlines that blare at us every day is to look at an ideological funhouse mirror in which sense and sensibility have been turned on its ear. Then we all collectively gasp just before pointing the fingers of blame at one party or another as the CSI people come to process the bleeding corpses. And you have your government and technology corporations who are held in thrall by the radical right represented by Robert Bowers, Cesar Sayoc and their hate-filled pied piper Donald Trump to thank for this.